Chapter 15: Aldric's Toast to the Fallen

We camped that night in the lee of a limestone escarpment whose upper face had split along an ancient seam, leaving a deep overhang that kept the wind off without quite constituting a cave. Cassian had found it by some method he did not explain — a trail marker invisible to the rest of us, perhaps, or simply a ranger's nose for shelter — and by the time we had settled, the sun was down and the sky was doing something complicated with colour in the west that none of us had the energy to appreciate properly.

Breck built the fire without being asked. He worked with the same methodical efficiency he had brought to the bridge charges, except that there was nothing of calculation in it — just a man who needed to do something with his hands and had chosen the one thing that would produce warmth for the people around him. I watched him arrange the tinder and thought, not for the first time, that grief expressed as labour is one of the more dignified forms grief takes.

We had been sitting in our separate silences for perhaps twenty minutes when Aldric said: "I think we should do something for him tonight."